Advertisement

Advertisement

Fungal products won’t win prizes for glamour but will be greener

Food, clothes and building materials made from mycelial threads impress Sjef van Gaalen at the Fungal Futures exhibition in Utrecht, the Netherlands

A mycelial message

Lize Kraan

By Sjef van Gaalen

Fungi are ubiquitous, but they often go unnoticed. When we do register their impact on our lives, we often associate them with disease, or death and decay. Their primary function, from our point of view, is to break down organic wastes, and maintain the flow of nutrients through our ecosystem. This renders them subtly, or sometimes not-so-subtly, unlikeable.

Spare a thought, then, for microbiologist Han Wösten of Utrecht University and Maurizio Montalti of Amsterdam-based design studio Officina Corpuscoli. They have curated Fungal Futures, an exhibition which seeks to expand our relationships with these organisms by presenting innovative uses of fungal threads – mycelium.

Wösten and Montalti invited artists and to imagine new products, using a palette of recently developed fungal materials. Their designs are supposed to suggest an eco-friendly and self-sustaining future in which petroleum products – especially plastics – have largely been replaced, and organic wastes optimally recycled. The results are impressive, but mixed. How you perceive them depends to a surprising extent on the way in which the show’s layout speaks to your assumptions and prejudices.

Advertisement

Whether a fungal future fascinates or repulses you, it is undeniably a relief to visit an exhibition not held inside the sterile white box of a contemporary gallery. Spring sun pours in through the roof of the old greenhouses of the University Museum in Utrecht, and with the window vents open, a light breeze fills the space with the smells of earth and figs. The restored iron and wood frames of the buildings and their resident plants provide a suitably textured background for work that invites you to imagine a more organic future.

The works themselves however, are displayed within sealed glass cases. One assumes – perhaps quite wrongly – that these exhibits are fragile and need to be quarantined from the real world, each in its own sterile mini-gallery. This is a bit of a problem in an exhibition that wants to highlight all the areas where mycelium products might make their mark, from the built environment to food.

Polyominoes, for example, is a new building material. The binding properties of mycelium allow it to fuse and form durable bonds with other organic materials. These blocks, then, could potentially transform our built environment. Still, you can’t help asking how they can possibly stand up to a world battered by climate change if they can’t survive being exposed in a greenhouse.

Officina-Corpuscoli/Maurizio-Montalti

The glass cases offer a more natural home to the Growing Shoes project (pictured above) and MycoTex dress. We’re used to future-oriented shows displaying these kinds of objects – invariably 3D-printed and so relying on oil-intensive resources and supply chains. The fungal alternatives displayed here are altogether greener. Wonderfully, they are actually intended to decay – as eloquent a commentary on the vagaries of fashion as any artist could contrive.

When we get to food production, an area where mycelium shows a lot of promise, the glass casing comes across as reassuringly hygienic. Here the talking point is Fungi Mutarium, a project to grow edible fungi on a base of waste plastic (see image below). Might we one day eat our way out of our pollution predicament? It’s a half off-putting, half-mouthwatering prospect.

Paris Tsitsos

We are far from identifying all the types of fungi with which we co-exist. And we are still discovering the unexpected role they can play in natural systems – together with other microorganisms, fungi could affect the formation of clouds, for example. Genetic engineering of fungi is opening up yet more material possibilities.

In the near future, however, it is likely to be the utilitarian properties of new mycelium materials that win us over. Already fungal products are making inroads in packaging and insulation, providing throwaway products we surely no longer want to make from plastic.

Fungal Futures provides glimpses of futures that will not, to be honest, prompt many launch parties. These are futures that, true to their nature, will grow unseen until their fruiting bodies break ground. The fungal takeover may be a slow one, but, on the evidence of this show, it is one we can unreservedly welcome.